Modern Magic
Page 239
Thompson was tall, and faster than he looked. He wheeled and caught the staff with one hand, turning its momentum against Teag and throwing him free. I stared in disbelief. Teag was a champion in several martial arts forms. I knew how much power he could put into that staff. Thompson’s hand and arm should have been broken to bits, but the necromancer looked no worse for the wear.
“Sorren! Have you come back for another fight?” Thompson’s mouth was moving, but the voice didn’t seem to belong to him. The voice sounded older, bitter and far more dangerous than what I would have expected from a guy like Thompson.
“We beat you once, Hitchens. We can do it again.” Sorren rose in the shadows, and came at Thompson again. This time, I saw an iron sword in Sorren’s right hand. Iron grounds magic, and it’s anathema to many supernatural beings—and deadly for mortals, too, if enough of it lands on your head.
Thompson/Hitchens shrieked in anger, a cry borne of madness, and it echoed through the huge, empty store. He snatched something from inside his shirt and held up an amulet on a long strap, holding it out like a shield toward Sorren and planting his feet to stand his ground.
Normally, vampire strength and speed not only knocks a mortal across the room, but it breaks some bones doing it. Before Sorren could reach him, a sickly green light arced from the talisman, striking Sorren in the chest. Sorren staggered, fighting the magic, sword raised and ready to strike, moving forward as if against a strong tide. Thompson laughed, enjoying Sorren’s struggle, and he pulled a long, thin knife from a sheath at his belt.
Caliel’s chanting was louder now. His drumming and the shoosh-shoosh of the gourd had grown faster, and I thought I caught a faint whiff of pipe smoke. Alicia had begun to mutter and cry out as the spirits of the dead heard her call and responded. Alicia’s body twitched and her head lolled back and forth, but she stayed upright, hands tight on the sewing machine. I held on too, pouring my magic into the old black and gold steel, and I felt Alicia drawing on that magic to strengthen her own.
Teag was back on his feet, limping as if he had twisted an ankle, but determined to come at Thompson again. This time, he had a rope net in his hands, and I knew his magic was woven into every knot. He threw the net when Thompson’s attention was on Sorren, and the tangle of rope and knots settled over the necromancer, who snarled and fought like a wild thing.
The greenish light faltered, and Sorren charged forward once more. Thompson careened to one side, tearing at the net. Just as Sorren swung his sword, the amulet’s glow flared again, straining against the fibers in the net. The iron blade cut into Thompson’s shoulder, but the necromancer’s power burst the net, sending the bits of rope down in a rain of burning bits that forced Sorren back.
Thompson pivoted, and I feared he was going after Teag with the knife in his hand, but instead, he drove the blade down into the flopping, squirming burlap bag with its captive chicken. Blood poured in a black river as the bird gave a final struggle and lay still.
“Did you think I would wait to lay my spells?” Hitchens’s voice roared from Thompson’s throat. “I will be avenged!” A streak of green light flashed from the necromancer’s amulet and struck the fresh, warm blood. A shriek rent the night, coming from everywhere at once, Charleston’s restless dead hearing the summons of a mad master.
From beneath the building, in the heart of the sink hole, I heard the sound of digging. My stomach lurched. Emily and the other lost dead of the old hurricane were being forced from their grave, bound to the will of a bitter, vengeful dabbler who was no less dangerous for his lack of control.
Teag gave a sharp cry and ran for Thompson, this time holding his staff as a lance. One hand gripped his agimat, a charm his Filipino martial arts master believed carried protection against evil spirits. A faint golden glow seemed to envelop Teag, radiating from the agimat, and he drove his staff into Thompson’s gut, running at full speed.
Thompson barely reacted, although the strike should have felled a regular man. He reached up and turned his amulet toward Teag, and the green glow flared blindingly bright. It struck the birch staff and sent it into flames. Teag dropped the burning wood and staggered back, and the sickly green light strove against the golden aura of the agimat.
Teag stumbled backwards, and before Sorren could regroup, a coruscating wall of green phosphorescence sprang up, cutting Thompson off from them. Outside, the sounds of digging were louder, along with noises that sounded like bodies heaving their way over obstacles.
“They’re coming,” Thompson gloated. “My magic raised them. And they’re going to make you pay. They’re going to make everyone pay. No one’s going to push me out again.”
Thompson might be a dabbler, but with Hitchens’s spirit possessing him, he was a formidable foe. Thompson flung the rear doors of the store open, doors that once had opened into a loading dock and now swung forth over a dark abyss. And as I watched, terrified, I saw bony hands reach up and begin to drag the long-ago forgotten dead to answer Thompson’s summons.
Caliel was behind where Alicia and I stood inside the circle, and his chanting had grown fevered. As I watched, a new form began to take shape—inside the circle, which was supposed to be impervious to magic. The figure was of a tall African man in a black and white checkered shirt. He wore a pair of sunglasses with only one lens, and a straw hat. His work pants had one leg rolled up higher than the other, and he stepped up behind Alicia as if to lay his hand on her shoulder.
I moved to intervene, but Caliel’s shout stopped me. “Let him be, Cassidy!” he sang in the same cadence as his chant. “Ghede Nibo’s here to help. Go now!” He went back to his chanting, but I took his message. Ghede Nibo placed his hands on Alicia’s shoulders, and she immediately relaxed against his insubstantial form.
I smudged the circle to let myself out, and at the last minute, I grabbed Danny’s award, still holding onto it through the cloth.
Thompson’s force shield was keeping Sorren and Teag at bay for the moment, and behind Thompson, a dozen skeletons had climbed from the pit. More followed. I stared at the animated skeletons and as I did, they took on sinew and muscle, then the ragged remnants of old-fashioned clothing. It broke my heart that Emily and her co-workers were being wrested from their grave for this final indignity, and in that grief I found the anger to drive my purpose.
I ran toward the green glow of Thompson’s shielding. It had to be taking power and concentration to hold that warding, and I wondered just how long he could hold it and raise the dead as well.
Sorren must have had the same idea. “He can’t hold all of us off, and call the spirits,” Sorren shouted. “Strike!”
I grabbed a forgotten plastic chair out of the refuse on the floor and ran at the sickly green light. Teag had a plastic pole. Sorren lifted a whole glass display case and threw it against the warding. It bounced back, shattering glass and sending splinters flying. Teag struck just an instant before me, and the field repelled him hard enough to send him sprawling on his back, but it lacked the force Thompson had used before. I hit the shield with my chair, roaring like a deranged lion.
The warding faltered and failed. I went careening toward Thompson just as he turned from his summoned dead. I caught him in the chest with the chair, hard enough to hear bones break. Apparently, with his warding knocked out, he was a little more vulnerable than before. Or maybe, the pale corpses who were thronging through the door were draining off some of his defensive power.
Thompson bared his teeth and his hand moved toward his amulet. I figured I was a goner, but I was closer than either Sorren or Teag, and someone had to do something. A crazy plan formed in my mind. Jacob Hitchens’s spirit had possessed Thompson to give him his powers. Danny Thompson’s mediocre self was epitomized in his pitiful award. Maybe I could drive out the interloper, and force Danny back where he belonged. More desperate than brave, I dropped the cloth that covered the “Best Effort” award and grabbed it as a weapon. As I did so, I channeled all my remaining power into the memories
that reverberated in the obelisk, the humiliation, the failure. Screaming at the top of my lungs, I drove the pointed tip of the clear plastic obelisk deep into his chest.
Thompson backhanded me hard enough that I went flying and saw stars. I heard him shouting at the newly-raised dead, and saw the zombies start toward Sorren and Teag. Sorren was strong and fast, and Teag was good in a fight, but the dead never tired and didn’t feel pain. The odds weren’t good.
I got to my hands and knees, ready to fight to the last. Thompson clutched at the plastic shaft in his chest. Blood covered his shirt and ran down his hands. He fixed me with a hateful glare and struggled to curse me, as blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.
“Kill!” Thompson managed, sagging to his knees. The zombies started forward.
“Stay where you are!” The voice came from Alicia’s direction, but the rich baritone was not her voice. I looked over, and the spirit of the man who had joined us in the circle had grown nearly solid. Ghede Nibo, Caliel had called him. He looked formidable, and he was definitely pissed.
Thompson was dying. I knew it and he knew it, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. “I called you,” he growled at the pitiful forms behind him. “I command you.”
“We will not serve.” This voice came from Alicia as well, but it was Emily speaking. One after another, strange voices cried out defiantly, and I saw that the zombies had come to a complete halt.
“Where is your army, little man?” Ghede Nibo spoke again, his deep voice tight with anger. Alicia looked lost in trance, but the cords of her neck strained with the effort. “I am the patron of those lost to disaster, the ghede of the unburied, the unknown dead, and those who drift below the waters. You have no power here, but I have power over you!”
Thompson’s whole form began to convulse. Blood frothed at his lips, and began to leak from his eyes, nose and ears. With one final scream of frustrated rage, Thompson’s ravaged body fell forward and lay still. And then, as I stared in horror, I saw a gray mist rise from the raw wound where the obelisk’s tip had penetrated Thompson’s back, and then a second tendril of black smoke.
“I waste no time on you,” Ghede Nibo snarled. “Come to me.” Powerless, the two wispy souls traveled to where the Ghede stood. “You will be no more.” And without another word, Ghede Nibo ate the souls.
Alicia trembled, but did not cry out. I was frozen in place, too terrified to move, covered in Thompson’s blood. Sorren stayed where he was, and Teag had not moved. All of us watched the ghostly man who spoke through Alicia.
“My children,” Ghede Nibo said, addressing the pitiful zombies who stood in the entranceway. “Too long you have been denied your rest. I free you—and I will dig your grave. Be at peace.”
The zombies collapsed where they stood, a jumble of bone and rotted cloth. And as they did, all around us, I heard the creaking and ripping of steel and brick.
“Run!” Sorren shouted. He grabbed me and dragged me backwards. Teag was limping, but he managed some speed as we ran for the back of the building.
“Go!” Caliel shouted. “Gotta finish what I started!” Ghede Nibo had released Alicia, and Teag hauled her over one shoulder as he limped toward the door where we had entered. Ceiling tiles were falling down around us, and then parts of the roof, crashing into glass display cases and knocking down the battered mannequins.
I cast one last glance behind me before Sorren shoved me out the door. I saw Caliel, still drumming and chanting. Two ghostly men stood with him. One was Ghede Nibo, and the other was a bent old man leaning on a cane, accompanied by a scrawny dog.
We barely made it into the parking lot before the old big box store began to tumble into the sink hole. When we had reached the cars, we stopped and stared in horror. The big box building was disintegrating, coming apart at the seams as the ground beneath it shuddered and the sinkhole spread. A roar of smashing brick and screaming steel, and the whole thing was gone in a thick cloud of dust.
“Caliel,” I murmured, leaning on Sorren for support.
Out of the smoke and darkness, I saw something coming. Caliel walked toward us. His white clothing was still untouched, and other than being soaked with sweat from the exertion of calling the loas, he looked unharmed.
“We had a good night, I think!” Caliel called out to us. “Tonight, we won.”
I stared at the billowing cloud where the old store had been, and thought about Emily and the other lost girls, and all the unknown flood victims Thompson and Hitchens had tried to enslave. Of how long their restless spirits had sought to escape from their prison. Now, they were at rest. I bet Blair Hunt and the developers would be amazed at how much the plaza’s fortunes changed. But right now, all I wanted was to get out of there before the cops found me covered in blood. I would deal with the reality that I had killed a man later. Right now, I was shaking too much to think.
“I’ve had enough Halloween for one year,” Teag said exhaustedly. “Time to call it a night.”
Retribution
I should have known, when I saw the silver hip flask, that it was going to be trouble.
“Hey Cassidy!” Teag Logan called out as we unpacked boxes from our most recent auction adventure. “Take a look. This is a real beauty!”
I glanced up from the box I was unpacking, and saw Teag hold up an antique flask. It had the clean lines of an Art Deco piece, and I wondered what long-ago bon vivant had tucked it into a coat pocket. “That should sell quickly,” I said. “It looks like something out of a Roaring Twenties bootlegger movie. Can you tell if it’s more than what it seems?”
For anyone else, a question like that might have referred to a feature that would make the flask more valuable. But not in my world. Teag knew what I really meant was: Does it have any bad juju that’s gonna knock me flat on my butt?
I’m Cassidy Kincaide, and I own Trifles and Folly, a 350 year-old antique and curio shop in historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina. The shop has been in my family almost since Charleston was founded back in 1670. And although most people just think of us as a great place to find beautiful and unusual antiques, the truth is a little more complicated. We exist to find dangerous magical and supernatural items and get them off the market before anyone gets hurt. Most of the time, we’ve been successful. On the rare occasions when we weren’t, history chalks the damage up to natural disasters.
I’m a psychometric, someone who can ‘read’ the history of an object just by touching it. That comes in handy for what we do, but it can also make for unpleasant surprises. My gift is the reason Uncle Evan left me the shop and how I inherited the job of getting magically malicious objects out of circulation. Teag is my assistant store manager, and he’s got some pretty cool magic of his own. Sorren is my business partner, the store’s real founder, and a nearly six hundred year-old vampire. Nothing about Trifles and Folly is business as usual.
“I think we might have a ‘spooky’,” he replied. “I’m picking up bad vibes, and I’m not nearly as sensitive as you are.”
“I’ll check it later,” I said. “Do we know anything about it?” I stood up and stretched, slipping a piece of my strawberry-blonde hair behind one ear. With blue eyes, freckles, and pale skin, my Scots-Irish ancestry is apparent to anyone who lays eyes on me. Only thanks to the hot Charleston sun, and a day spent canvassing yard sales, I was decidedly pink from the sun even though it was autumn.
The boxes had been delivered from the auction at the Legacy Hotel, a long-shuttered landmark that had once been a Prohibition-era speakeasy. “There’s nothing unusual, other than the flask, which obviously belonged to one of the Legacy’s customers,” he remarked.
I looked down at the half-emptied box I was working on. “Put it aside and I’ll have a look once I finish this box.”
I turned back to the box and was about to lift out the next bundle when I froze. “Hey Teag, I need your help with this,” I called. “I’ve got another Spooky.”
A Spooky is what I call an item that give
s off a dark psychic resonance. It may have had a tragedy associated with it, or it might possess dangerous power of its own. Those take special handling, and often, I hand them off to Sorren to get rid of. ‘Sparklers’ have a touch of supernatural power, but aren’t usually dangerous. We check them out thoroughly, and decide how to handle them on a case-by-case basis. The truly harmless pieces we’ll sell to discerning buyers, and anything questionable Sorren takes care of. ‘Mundanes’ are non-magical items, and they go on sale in the front showroom.
“Sure. What do you have?” Teag asked. He eyed the paper-wrapped bundle.
I checked the packing list. “According to this, it’s a poker chip set. No idea why it would be ‘hot’ but I’d rather deal with it later.” I paused, concentrating on what my gift could read even keeping my hand several inches above the item. “It’s not active right now, and it’s not dangerous to handle, but there’s something dark about it.”
Teag nodded and bent down to pull out the bundle. He carried it over to the table and unwrapped a beautiful burled birch wooden box that was a smaller version of the kind used to store silver flatware. He sifted through the papers that wrapped the item and a small card fell out.
“That’s odd,” Teag mused. “It’s a novena card for Our Lady of Lourdes. Not exactly what I’d expect to find packed with a poker set.” Teag touched the box and waited a moment, and when nothing happened, he flipped the lid open. The inside of the box was covered with velvet that was in remarkable condition given its age. Vintage poker chips nestled into six rows of shallow depressions in the lining, and a small square area had room for two yellowed decks of cards.
“It’s gorgeous,” Teag murmured. He reached in and picked up a couple of the poker chips, weighing them in his hand. “Clay chips. They’re the right age to be from the speakeasy days.”